Uyen P. Le

I am a second-year PhD student in the Computer Science department at Stony Brook University, advised by Prof. Yifan Sun. My research focuses on optimization methods for deep learning.

Research Interests: Optimization for Deep Learning, Machine Learning Theory, Adaptive Learning Rate Methods

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Aug 26, 2024	Started as a PhD student at Stony Brook University!

selected publications

The Impacts of Unanswerable Questions on the Robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension Models

Son Quoc Tran, Phong Nguyen-Thuan Do, Uyen Le, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, May 2023

Abs DOI

Pretrained language models have achieved super-human performances on many Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) benchmarks. Nevertheless, their relative inability to defend against adversarial attacks has spurred skepticism about their natural language understanding. In this paper, we ask whether training with unanswerable questions in SQuAD 2.0 can help improve the robustness of MRC models against adversarial attacks. To explore that question, we fine-tune three state-of-the-art language models on either SQuAD 1.1 or SQuAD 2.0 and then evaluate their robustness under adversarial attacks. Our experiments reveal that current models fine-tuned on SQuAD 2.0 do not initially appear to be any more robust than ones fine-tuned on SQuAD 1.1, yet they reveal a measure of hidden robustness that can be leveraged to realize actual performance gains. Furthermore, we find that robustness of models fine-tuned on SQuAD 2.0 extends on additional out-of-domain datasets. Finally, we introduce a new adversarial attack to reveal of SQuAD 2.0 that current MRC models are learning.